S’mores Cupcakes

We made these cupcakes about a month ago but got too busy to post about them, which is unfortunate because they were really freakin’ good. Since I’m sitting here waiting for a plumber (my guest bathroom flooded from the top down and the ceiling caved in… it’s been one of those months) and craving the heck out of some cupcakes, I thought this would be the perfect time to share these with you.

We checked out a lot of recipes for s’mores cupcakes, most of which feature a graham cracker cake. For me, the graham cracker is not the star of the s’mores show – it’s just what holds everything together. We just wanted a hint of that flavor and we wanted to keep the textural aspect of the cracker in tact, so we decided to go with a graham cracker crust. We started by crushing up the grahams:

Using a meat tenderizer is fun, but optional. We added butter and sugar to the graham cracker crumbs, stirred, and then pressed them into the bottom of the cupcake liners:

We chopped up some semi-sweet chocolate to form a chocolatey layer between the cake and the crust that would hold it all together. Then we popped them in the oven and baked until the chocolate pieces melted:

Then it was time for the cake batter. None of the recipes we saw featured chocolate the way we thought a s’more should, so we made up our own chocolate chocolate chip batter and poured it on to the crusts:

Because part of the cup is already taken up by the crust, you’ll have a lot of batter leftover. We use ours to make mini cupcakes that we “test taste” throughout the day. It’s a good idea to taste minis with your frosting instead of just piping and praying they taste good together. They came in extra handy this time because we got to test our frosting browning method. We made marshmallow frosting for these, an obvious choice. It involved A LOT of standing around, beating the frosting while it was on a double boiler:

Since we don’t have a pastry torch (and, honestly, the thought of one of us with a torch is a little scary), we decided to try using the broiler in the oven to toast the marshmallow frosting. We piped some blobs of it on to our minis and gave it a try:

It worked! Sort of – you can kind of see from the picture that one in the middle just oozed everywhere. We decided not to pipe so high on the full sized cakes:

We put this cute little guy in the oven to broil and he came out so pretty! Perfectly golden and with a nice swirl. We were really excited:

Side note: Piping marshmallow frosting is really sticky, messy business. Lisa was cleaning bits of it off of things for a week and I, well, just take a look:

Not all of them came out this well – as we tried to do a large batch we noticed that the ones we piped first would gradually lose their shape and that, because of oven hot spots, they didn’t all brown evenly. Still, they looked good!

We added a little Hershey’s square for garnish:

Then we ate one. OMG, they tasted amazing. The smooth chocolatey cake, the crunch and sandiness of the graham cracker crust, and the sticky richness of the marshmallow frosting all combined to make the PERFECT s’more. These are still my favorites, as I am a huge marshmallow fan, and I can’t wait to make them again.

Comments (4)

Your cupcakes are really delicious and they look really nice
Good Job!!

Shana SchwarzApril 8th, 2011 at 11:04 am

Had these at Becky and Jon’s wedding and oh. my. Gawd. Heaven. Heaven in my mouth. I warned my husband that if he doesn’t treat me right, I will leave him for the cupcake ladies. And I meant it. I passed on your info to lots of my friends and hope to be invited to more events with your cupcakes. Speaking of which- maybe you guys could make some treats for my daughter’s bday this month? Hmm. April 27th (wednesday). Call me! 310-955-8099